I have noticed over the last couple of years one trend that is bothersome. The size of food packages I buy at the store are shrinking, but the price has not. For example, ice cream used to come in half gallon containers, then suddenly they became 1.75 quarts and now they are down to 1.5 quarts, but the price has not moved lower. Other places I have noticed this is in cold cereals – the weight keeps shrinking and at some restaurants – the portions have decreased in size (e.g., Panera Bread). While this may be good for overall obesity trends, it is not great for my wallet. Anyone else noticed these trends?

On a related note, did anyone notice that when gas prices shot up dramatically, the speed with which gas is pumped into the car slowed down in order to make you feel like you were getting more for the much higher price?

What happens is this: Before they reduce the size, they slap a “20% more free!” emblem onto the box for 6 months. Once they eliminate the emblem, they eliminate the “free” portion and shrink the size.

My understanding is that back when Nixon and others supported the wage and price control, Hershey couldn’t raise the price of their almond chocolate bar, so they decided to remove a single almond from each, which became a source of some dispute about whether they were changing the price by changing the product. Perhaps this is an urban legend.

My favorite example of this is when peanut butter makers put a huge dent in the bottom of the bottle. Standing side by side with a normal container you wouldn’t know that it is a different volume, because the visible dimensions are the same.

Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison. Though true cylinders without–within, the villanous green goggling glasses deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating bottom. Parallel meridians rudely pecked into the glass, surround these footpads’ goblets. Fill to THIS mark, and your charge is but a penny; to THIS a penny more; and so on to the full glass–the Cape Horn measure, which you may gulp down for a shilling.

Thanks to the Federal Reserve, the prices of everything should be expected to double every eighteen years. So the real question is, is food more expensive in real terms compared to eighteen years ago, or isn’t it?

I was so disturbed by sticker shock that I had to adopt the rule that I divide the price by half, and see if that price is expensive compared to what I am used to. If not, I figure it must be a pretty good deal.

In 2030, I will have to divide by four. Twenty dollars for a gallon of ice cream? That’s a screamin’ deal!

When I began my mission in Brazil in 1993 inflation was rampant. This wasn’t something that we measured in terms of x% a year, because the number would be too big to use for the sort of everyday calculations that become normal under hyperinflation. Instead we thought in terms of half-lives. The half-life of your money, sitting in your pocket, was 30 days. So you spent it the instant you got it. Oddly even without a newspaper it was easy to have a rough estimate of the exchange rate on any given day. A 2-liter of Coke cost a dollar, and they were always prominently displayed at the entrance of the supermarket. Then you would hunt for items that hadn’t had their prices adjusted in the last week or so and thus were unusually inexpensive. Once we found a brand of rice hidden away in a corner of the store that went six weeks without the price changing. As soon as we got our allowance we bought all they had left.

“Blue Bell is available in all or part of 17 states. Blue Bell is available in all of the following states: Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. Blue Bell is also available in some parts of the following states: Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, North Carolina and Florida.”

My wife bought graham crackers for the smores at our ward’s youth activity a few weeks ago. They are the same length as always but they are about 1/2″ narrower. They don’t look like graham crackers, they look like graham sticks.

My mother, who fed a large family on a small budget, in a large Eastern city, trained us at a very young age to check the price per unit measure for all our grocery purchases. It drives my wife a little bit insane, and she has for the most part deferred grocery shopping responsibilities to me.

When our kids were little and we were really poor I used to ration everything. They ate well but things like store bought bread and sugared cereals were treats. I used to dream about going into a store and buying whatever I wanted.

I haven’t noticed what you’re describing. It’s different when you’re older. But food doesn’t taste as good. I can’t explain it.

I heard that Americans are killing trees dispoportionately to the rest of the world because of our good toilet paper. Good toilet paper takes a lot of trees. And I ask myself: toilet paper ? Or trees?

Hard decision but I can’t live without my (less sheets to the roll but unquestionably softer) Charmin. Let my grandchildren eat cake.

As an above poster stated, the average consumer is very price sensitive versus the size. Anotherwords you will lose a lot more customers if you raise the price and leave the size consistent versus doing it the opposite way. Your experience may differ, but you wouldn’t be average. Also margins in the food industry are very tight, so a quarter ounce change could mean millions to the bottom line, much like the almond example above.
On the plus side this can help the obesity crisis as consumers perceived serving size can be determined by the unit amount rather than the calorie content of the product :-)
And yes, I work for a very large global food company, so it affects my Mormonism.

Hershey’s top product for over 50 years was the nickle bar, the size of which fluctuated greatly depending upon cocoa prices. In 1970, they gave up pricing a candy bar at $.05 entirely once it was approximately the size of an Andes Mint.

This got especially bad last year as commodity costs were soaring. Now they’ve come down substantially, and demand is also down. Here’s evidence that should make you happy indicating the trend is reversing (at least for chips):

Someone already pointed out the Consumerist track on this phenomenon. I actually recently found a counter-example: Chicken-of-the-Sea Solid White Albacore Tuna in Water (as purchased in 12-packs at Costco) recently went from 6 oz cans to 7 oz cans. What’s more, if you open the cans side-by-side, the 7 oz can has less fluid and more chunkier tuna. Unfortunately, I don’t have comparative pricing for the old 6-oz 12-packs to compare pricing for the newer 7 oz 12-packs. But I sure like the new 7-oz cans better (less waste per unit food, too).

And, Harold, since we’re command to build up food storage and live within our means, this has everything to do with Mormonism. :-) ..bruce..

Consumers are stuck with a hard choice. Either you want cheap food that can be stored relatively easily (modern processed foods), or you need to spend a lot more time on daily food shopping and preparation (also more expensive – especially when you figure in your man hours dedicated to the process).

A good source for this problem is Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemna.